The picture is not as important as the audio. The people who have been here for a long time know that I lived In Chicago for about a year and a half in an apartment about a mile off the end of the main E/W runway at O’Hare. The building has significant sound mitigation efforts to reduce the plane noise. A plane lands about every 54 seconds all day long.
I had bought the condo in Charlotte and went back in Chicago packing up. I went outside to film a typical plane on final approach when all hell broke loose. O’Hare airport has to be in pretty much any list of critical vulnerable infrastructure.
The alarming part is the very loud computerized voice. I have no idea where it was coming from. There was no obvious source – it probably was the fire station on Cumberland Avenue about a mile away.
It became apparent this was the monthly siren test – I only heard it because I was in the parking lot. Which raised the question why you would spend money for a sophisticated warning system, then soundproof buildings so you can’t hear it 😉
LOL – You were in China (upside down). I can’t quite make out the words – some kind of test.
The words were coming from a directional speaker. Generally what it is saying was “this is a test of the emergency notification system of the Northern fire district covering Harwood Heights and Norwood. The alley at the edge of the parking lot is the city limit of Chicago on this sliver of land connecting Chicago to the airport. The complex has a very large parking lot that was never close to full, but the City of Chicago charges you around $90 a year for a parking permit to park on private property.
Yes – I used to live in Lake County and paid something like $60 a year for the privilege of parking in the county. I remember that and the $300 a month electric bills in the summer.
I am also amazed (like you) that the soundproofed buildings that would have no clue what the speakers were blaring.
North Carolina (and CT) do it instead through a personal property tax based on the car’s value. The difference is the parking stickers then justify a lot of patronage jobs to go around looking for cars registered out of the city or out of state and hitting them with stiff fines. Large parts of the city also have special extra restricted parking at a higher cost. Getting you car towed starts at about $400
The advantages of a single party system… how it worked in Detroit and the Soviet Union.
You have to admit in both cases they succeeded in making (almost) everyone equally poor.
Of course. It take more and more people away from productive work and pays more and more people based on political cronyism.
The advantage of multiple parties is usually that they can clear out the dead wood but that stopped with the unionization of the public “servants”.
iDevices seem to have issues with identifying which direction is “up” in a video. I probably hold the device upside down. The display flips but not the camera, which gathers the image a line at a time.
The way cheap digital cameras work creates interesting video when you are moving at high speed – because the device is scanning a line at a time, straight objects “lean”, and the closer the object is to you, the more it leans because of the more rapid change in viewing angle.
Sounds like a mean lean machine. lol